Interview: Director of Virginia Tech's Big Event

With more than 5,700 volunteers and a budget around $45,000, Virginia Tech currently has the second largest Big Event nationwide. The Big Event is a student-run community service project in which students, faculty and staff give back to the community by taking on various assignments for one day.

As director of this year’s Big Event, Dan Knisley has a strong desire to improve the event and hopefully encourage more volunteers to come out this spring and help the community. In an interview with Planet Blacksburg, Knisley proved to be relatively confident with his abilities and his ideas for improvements in the Big Event.

Q. How did you get involved with the Big Event?

Knisley: I started off my freshman year [of college]. I volunteered and actually had a terrible experience with it. It’s funny. I ended up getting poison oak from the volunteer site. I had to stay in my bed for a week straight. But the actual project was great; it wasn’t the Big Event [that caused the poison oak]. I volunteered my sophomore year and was on the executive committee starting my junior year.

Q. Does being the director of the Big Event have any correspondence to your major?

Knisley: It does somewhat. I am a public and non-profit management major. The non-profit aspect incorporates a good amount of what at least I’ve done with the Big Event and the route we have taken.

Q. You were the assistant director last year. Do you have any anxieties about taking on such a big role as director this year?

Knisley: Not really, it’s kind of interesting. Myself and last year’s director Michael [Jabs], who is probably my best friend, we kind of did a lot of things together last year. So I have kind of experienced pretty much everything I’m going to experience this year, which is good in a lot of ways. We can add more things in, I know what to expect, and I’m prepared to take things even further than we did last year.

Q. Do you have any specific plans for improvement for this year’s Big Event?

Knisley: There are a lot of things we plan on adding this year. A lot of the things we did in 2009 were to make improvements for the future, and we are expanding on that this year. One of the biggest things we did last year was creating the Big Event Association which is a non-profit that Michael [Jabs] and me are the directors of. It is basically there to expand and promote the Big Event nationwide because there are other universities that have the Big Event. We created that; we spent last fall semester writing up the paper work and getting all the applications approved. That is one thing that we are building on this coming year. We are adding, through that, a conference for the universities to come here and see our Big Event if they want to start their own Big Event or if they want to improve the one they already have. On top of that we are doing a Big Event concert the day of, which will happen that night and will be a nice addition to the day. It will hopefully be free admission to all the volunteers.

Q. Do you have any ideas about ways to get more volunteers this year?

Knisley: We have worked on a lot of things, the biggest of which is name recognition. I think that just naturally happens every year. In addition to that we have started talking to leaders in the core, trying to get them to come out more. We have also talked to a lot of large organizations that we have missed in the past. We are trying to expand more to the faculty and the administration. That’s one of the big things that I don’t think people know; we open the volunteer signup to the faculty as well so there’s a lot of improvement that can be made there.

Q. Where do you get the funds for the projects in the Big Event?

Knisley: There are a lot of different avenues. SGA is of course our sponsor, we are a program of SGA. They give us a large amount of money. We also have one major donor, Northwestern Mutual, and they give us about $10,000 a year. That basically runs a lot of the logistical aspects of the event; it goes towards tools, insurance, things like that. Then we get various other sponsors that we get throughout the year. The budget is somewhere around $45,000, so we have a lot of different places the money comes from.

Q. How do you determine what projects you do around the community?

Knisley: Well, we accept pretty much any project that is submitted as long as it is safe. When we go out and look for projects we’re not looking for anything to do with need or economic status or anything like that, what we are looking for is to safely benefit the community. So we will really do anything people request as long as we can send students out there knowing that they are going to be OK. We do a risk evaluation form at every project that we go to that is filled out by one of our committee or staff members, and if it comes back fine then we will accept that project.

Q. How many other positions do you have on your executive committee?

Knisley: As far as the executive committee goes, there are a total of 16 other positions. On top of that there is another 90 or so committee members and then, we haven’t selected them for this year yet, but about another 60 to 70 staff members.

Q. And you get a lot of help from the executive committee?

Knisley: Yeah, you know, it’s obviously a tiered thing in terms of the time commitment, but the executive committee takes on a lot of the planning and a lot of the decision making . The committee and staff do a lot of the actual leg work: project checks, contacting large churches and schools, things like that in order to obtain projects. They do a lot of our target days where we actually go out into the community and put out our flyers and project request forms.

Q. What kind of feedback do you get from members of the community.

Knisley: We get a lot of good feedback, along with some negative feedback. Obviously with an event that size there is bound to be issues that arise. One thing that we are actually looking to improve on is getting a response from everyone this year. We are doing a post-event mailer with all the project recipients and they will be able to have the chance to provide feedback on the event itself. We get a lot of thank you letters; we get a lot of people that will send e-mails or letters. One went to president Steger last year; it went straight to him and he forwarded it to us. So we do get a lot of positive feedback.

Q. Do you get any feedback from volunteers?

Knisley: We do, we send out a survey to all the team captains afterwards. Again there is a lot of positive, a lot of negative feedback. The Big Event basically is a growing process year to year, and all of that feedback kind of goes into what we plan on improving the next year. We get a good amount of feedback.

Q. To get involved in the Big Event as a student, you sign up as either an individual or a team. How many students would you say sign up each year?

Knisley: Last year we have 5,745 participants. I believe that’s the number we ended up with. Which is the largest we have ever had. The previous year had about 3,500 participants. Last year we saw a lot of growth, so we are hoping to do the same this year.

Q. Would you say you have more volunteers sign up in a group or as an individual?

Knisley: Most sign up as groups. What will happen is people will sign up as a dorm team or an organization will sign up together. But this year our sign up system is going to be changed a little bit to make it a little bit easier as an individual and we put you on a team. Also, individuals can sign-up underneath another team. In the past the team captain would have to sign up and make the team and then sign participants up for the team; this year we are hoping to do it a little differently.

Q. Have you always been involved with volunteer activities, for instance, in high school?

Knisley: In high school I wasn’t so involved in volunteer activities; I did a lot of sports and those kind of things took up most of my time. Once I got to college my freshman year I didn’t really do much first semester, but second semester I went out for German Club. From there a lot of opportunities opened up through people that were already involved in organizations encouraging me to come out. My sophomore year the director [of the Big Event] was Brian Torgersen. He was president of the German Club at the time, and he encouraged myself and a couple of other guys to apply for the executive committee, and that’s kind of how we got into the Big Event. I have done things with relay and a bunch of other organizations, but that’s kind of what drove me to get involved.

Q. In the future do you plan on doing a lot of volunteer work as a career?

Knisley: Yeah, you know with my major being public and non-profit management hopefully I will be working as an executive director for some sort of non-profit, or fundraising executive. It’s kind of going to be a part of what I do hopefully for a long time. On top of that the Big Event Association, something that myself and last year’s director Michael are planning on working on for a long time in the future. It’s kind of something we saw and created and we want it to work so we have been working on that for the past year and hopefully for years to come.

Q. Have you ever considered doing the event more than once a year?

Knisley: that’s been something that has been considered in the past. It’s a really tough situation for us to be in because the way the transition of our executive committee happens. The dates and how they fall makes it kind of tough, but one thing that we have done in the past is do a executive and committee service project in the fall. So a smaller scale project that we, as about 120 people, will get together and do. It’s not open to the university obviously but it’s something that will still make an impact in the fall and kind of reminds people what the Big Event is. One of the main things we have started to use the fall for is fundraising for our spring event. With the event being so large in the spring, it’s hard for us to actually be able to incorporate something on such a large scale in the fall as well.

Q. Where do we compare in terms of Big Events around the nation?

Knisley: We are the second largest. We actually just reached that rank, as of last year. Before that we were the third. Texas A&M is where it started, they have been around for over 30 years and have about 12,000 volunteers. Last year we surpassed Oklahoma as the second largest and they have right around 5,000 volunteers. Those are the three main ones but there are a lot of other ones that haven’t reached the same status yet.